Tag: bdpreferraltracker

I put in my hack to the BDP Referral Tracker and now the list is back in the sidebar again. Since unmodified the plugin uses resources poorly enough to bring down my box, this is the only way I know how to run it reasonably. It’s not perfect, but it rebuilds that list once an hour and uses the cache the rest of the time. I still don’t like how the list is completely filled with Google links. I’m thinking about removing them from the list.

The plugin has three settings – save the full link, save the URL minus parameters, or just the domain name. I’d like to get one entry in the count for all google links, but if I set it in the middle then it breaks the URL for a lot of blogs. I dunno. Maybe I’ll take that hit anyway, just to make the list more reasonable. I’m still in fiddle mode on this.

So a while back I posted about the problems I had with the BDP Referral Tracker. I vacillated and turned it back on, but although I had some mitigation keeping the load on the server box from getting insane but it was still too high. The problem seems to be entirely on the display of statistics though. The plugin is activated and collecting data right now and that puts very little strain on the box.

I think I’m going to hack the plugin a little to add a cache to the database so that the plugin isn’t having to reassemble the same statistics over and over again, ever single page hit. I think I’ll have it cache them for an hour, which is good enough for me. It shouldn’t take too long to do something like this. I like the plugin and all, but it’s way too wasteful with resources for a blog with any reasonable flow of traffic.

I noticed recently that things with the referral tracker in the sidebar didn’t seem to be working right. For example, despite a crapload of incoming traffic in the Ze-slide, none of those ever got counted. I went to look at the site for the plugin and I realized that the current version is 1.0.6 and I was using 0.3.9 . The bummer is that to upgrade required migrating it to a new database table and losing all the old stats. So, as of this evening the clock is reset and we are starting over at Day 0. I’m still fiddling with configuration but we’ll get it straight soon enough.